A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

Actually, Lovecraft’s first exposure to poetic radicalism had occurred some years before. ‘I have lately been amusing myself by a perusal of some of the “Imagism” nonsense of the day’, he writes in August 1916.⁹ ‘As a species of pathological phenomena it is interesting.’ This provides a sufficient indication of Lovecraft’s attitude toward free verse in general and Imagism in particular. I am not sure what works Lovecraft read at this time; perhaps he read some of the three anthologies entitled Some Imagist Poets, which appeared between 1915 and 1917. He sums up his objections to modern poetry in ‘The Vers Libre Epidemic’ (Conservative, January 1917). Here Lovecraft distinguishes between two forms of radicalism, one of mere form, the other of thought and ideals. For the first, Lovecraft cites a fellow-amateur, Anne Tillery Renshaw, whom he admired greatly for her devotion to the amateur cause but whose poetic theories he found every opportunity to rebut. He frequently remarks that, for all the metrical novelty of her own poetry, it very often lapses in spite of itself into fairly orthodox forms. In ‘Metrical Regularity’ (Conservative, July 1915) Lovecraft paraphrases her theory (‘the truly inspired bard must chant forth his feelings independently of form or language, permitting each changing impulse to alter the rhythm of his lay, and blindly resigning his reason to the “fine frenzy” of his mood’) as expressed in an article in her amateur journal, Ole Miss’, for May 1915; to which Lovecraft makes the pointed response: ‘The “language of the heart” must be clarified and made intelligible to other hearts, else its purport will forever be confined to its creator.’ This single sentence could serve as an adequate indictment of the obscurantism of much twentieth-century poetry.

The second, more disturbing type of radicalism—of thought and ideals—is treated more harshly. In ‘The Vers Libre Epidemic’ this school is said to be represented by ‘Amy Lowell at her worst’: ‘a motley horde of hysterical and half-witted rhapsodists whose basic principle is the recording of their momentary moods and psychopathic phenomena in whatever amorphous and meaningless phrases may come to their tongues or pens at the moment of inspirational (or epileptic) seizure’. This is fine polemic, but not very good reasoned argument. Lovecraft would carry on the battle against avant-garde poetry for the rest of his life, although one imagines that by the 1930s he was beginning to feel that the struggle was hopeless. But this did not alter his devotion to conservative poetry, although in his later arguments he modified his position considerably and advocated the view that poetry must speak straightforwardly, but elegantly and coherently, in the language of its own day.

Lovecraft frequently used pseudonyms for his contributions to the amateur press, especially for poetry. A total of about twenty pseudonyms have so far been identified. Only a few, however, were used with any regularity: Humphry Littlewit, Esq.; Henry PagetLowe; Ward Phillips; Edward Softly; and, most frequent of all, Lewis Theobald, Jun. Some of these names are scarcely very concealing of Lovecraft’s identity. The Lewis Theobald pseudonym, of course, derives from the hapless Shakespearian scholar whom Pope pilloried in the first version (1728) of The Dunciad.

In some cases Lovecraft used pseudonyms merely because he was contributing poetry so voluminously to the amateur press— especially to C. W. Smith’s Tryout—that he perhaps did not wish to create the impression that he was hogging more space than he deserved. In other instances, Lovecraft may have genuinely wished to disguise his identity because of the anomalous content of the poem involved. But it becomes very difficult to characterize some of Lovecraft’s pseudonyms, especially those under which a large number of works were published, and he evidently used them merely as the spirit moved him and without much thought of creating any genuine persona for the pseudonyms in question.

Many of Lovecraft’s early poems were on political subjects. Political events of the period 1914–17 offered abundant opportunities for Lovecraft’s polemical pen, given his early attitudes on race, social class, and militarism. Lovecraft could of course not know that his entry into amateur journalism in April 1914 would occur only four months before the outbreak of the First World War; but once the war did commence, and once he saw that his country was not about to enter it any time soon to stand with his beloved England, Lovecraft’s ire was stirred. For prose attacks on world affairs his chosen vehicle was the Conservative; his verses on world affairs were scattered far and wide throughout amateurdom.